 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining us today is Roderick Long. He's professor of philosophy at Auburn University, director and president of the Molinary Institute, a senior fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society and a regular contributor to Libertarianism.org. His new book is Rituals of Freedom, Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism. Welcome to Free Thoughts. Hi, thank you. Good to be here. So, I wanted to start not with Confucianism, but actually with something you mentioned right at the beginning of the book, which may be slightly more familiar to our audience, which is Taoism, a lot of Libertarian works. The Libertarian Mind by our colleague David Bose, for example, begins by saying the earliest Libertarian thinker we can see at work in Taoism is allowed to, and you begin by pushing back on that by saying that's not quite right, that not only is Confucianism a better fit for that, but that the interpretations of Taoism we get from Libertarians are not accurate. So, can you tell us maybe what Taoism is first and how Libertarians get it wrong? Okay. Well, I mean, Taoism and Confucianism are two of the earliest schools of Chinese thought. Exactly how early Lao Tzu is, is a matter of controversy, because traditionally he's dated to the 6th century BC or thereabouts, which is one reason that, you know, to the extent that he's a Libertarian thinker, he's often thought to be the first because he's so early. But the modern view is that probably his book, The Doubting, dates from something closer to the 4th or 3rd century BC, so that actually it's a little later. So even to whatever extent he is a Libertarian, he's not the first, he's got confusions before him, but I'm certain there is a strong anti-statist, anti-authoritarian strain in the Taoists, I don't deny that, but there's also a kind of anti-civilization theme in the Taoists, a tendency to think, for example, Lao Tzu says that the ideal society would be one in which people live in little villages and they have lost the art of writing and so they only keep records by tying knots and string and they can hear the dogs barking and the roosters crowing in the next village over the hill, but they've never been over there. And more broadly, a kind of suspicion of conceptual thought, the idea that conceptual thought falsifies, that conceptual thought misleads us with language, misleads us, and the idea that we should return to a kind of primitive simplicity, that we should be like an uncarved block. Those are sentiments that most Libertarians are not really that into, most Libertarians are fans of language and conceptual abstraction, they're fans of trade and civilization and technology, and so that's a theme, now the Taoists are complicated, so you can find strands and they're pushed in other directions, but the two main Taoists, Lao Tzu and Zhuang Tzu, both, at least there is a strong primitivist element in them that may remind us more of Rousseau than of, or what aspect of Rousseau since he's also complicated, and this kind of primitivist anti-civilization, anti-rational theme. Now, there are a lot of good things in the Taoists too, I don't want to just come here and dump on the Taoists, but I think they are in many ways not as close precursors for Libertarianism as the Confucians are. What type of world, if it was Lao Tzu was in the third or fourth century, as you said, as scholars now think, were they living for the Taoists and then also, we can talk about this for Confucius, in a state, a kind of thing that we would recognize as a modern state where maybe even if we apply Libertarian concepts to them, we might be doing that illegitimately because they weren't really part of a government, more of a community for example? Well, so what had happened, the Chinese philosophy arises in the wake of the collapse of the Zhou dynasty, and when you go back to the Zhou dynasty, history starts becoming a little murky, our recorded history really starts around the time of its collapse, so we don't know that much about the details of the Zhou dynasty, but it collapsed and fragmented, and so we have a period where lots of new little states are popping up. You have various generals and princes and so forth who are carving out new little states for themselves. I think they count as states more or less, they're territorial monopolies ruled by some jumped up prince or other, and really Chinese philosophy starts from this because you have all these educators and scholars and bureaucrats who are suddenly wandering out of a job with the collapse of the previous dynasty, and they are, and they're going to, from one to another, these little states offering their services as political advisors, and so two different political advisors show up at the same state and they want to advise the prince what to do, and so they have to give arguments as to why the prince should listen to him rather than the other one, you start getting debates and so forth, and the early period of Chinese philosophy seems to grow out of that context. Yeah, I think that it was a context of states, new states, rapidly forming states, competing states, states in particular that competing for population, the new states were trying to get people to move from neighboring states to them, they were strongly encouraging immigration because they wanted more workers and more industry and so forth, and so one of the things that these traveling scholars would do is try and give the prince advice about what policies would attract more people into their states. Well then I guess let's turn to Confucius then, and maybe, so when was he, and give us a bit about his background and character before we get into his thought? Okay, well Confucius himself lived around the late sixth, early fifth century BC and he was one of these displaced scholars who traveled around offering his services and he started a movement that we call Confucianism, they didn't call themselves that, they called themselves by a phrase that means something like the literati is sometimes translated. Confucius himself, Kungtze or Kungtze, what we have from him, it's not clear whether it's something he wrote or whether it's something that was assembled by his students, what we have by him is very cryptic and elliptical and when I talk about Confucianism, really have in mind less Confucius himself than the people in the next few centuries that came along and developed his thought and consider themselves continuators of Confucius. So I have in mind in particular Mungtze or Mencius as he's sometimes called, who was in the fourth century, Shunze in the third century and then the historians so much in the second century, when we're looking for libertarian ideas that I think it's really in those three above all that we find them, if you're trying to figure out, trying to get philosophical ideas out of Confucius himself is tricky, it's really hard to figure what's going on, although people have, I think people found them, people have argued that there's a kind of emphasis on voluntary interactions and interactions of respect for other people and suspicion of state power that you get in Confucius himself, but really I think it's the later Confucians who come after that who are so the clearest precursors of libertarianism. So I wanted to clarify, you said that his students put together his writings for Confucius, so we're not sure, kind of like Aristotle sounds, we're not sure what exactly is original to him. Yeah, and that's the case with a lot of the early thinkers. I mean, a lot of the early thinkers, they have a book or two that will be their great work, and often each chapter will begin with, for example, with Mencius, each chapter begins, Mencius said, blah, blah, blah, the other with Shunze, we don't get that any more, Shunze might just be sort of his own straight writing in his own words. So as time goes on, we have a clear idea who's doing what, but with the early writings, it's often not clear. And with Laozi, we don't even know, with Laozi, we know virtually, virtually nothing about the author. Well, for another clarification, because I've studied a lot of early Christianity, and I've read a little bit of Confucius, and it is sort of this poetic, elliptical, aphoristic kind of thing. And but some of the early types of sayings of Jesus, we see this too, which is interesting by itself, sort of these wise men speaking in elliptical sentences that maybe later people interpret, but also another... Yeah, and with that, we have the, a lot of scholars think that there's some early collection of Jesus's sayings that different gospels are drawing on and we don't have the original reflection. And but the figure of Confucius himself, did he ever warrant more divine type of respect, more than a philosopher from his followers, or did he always kind of stay a philosopher? Well, he certainly didn't, you know, did not claim any kind of divine or semi-divine status. I think he would have been, you know, rather upset to find out that later generations started elevating him. The real elevation of him comes, you know, but later than this, he's getting sort of later Confucianism. In retrospect, he becomes more and more of a semi-divine, supernatural figure. But in early Confucianism, he's, you know, he's a great teacher. He's very greatly respected, but there's nothing supernatural about the way he's portrayed early on. So the risk of asking something slightly off topic, but this, this notion of writing in this elliptical way, an aphoristic way raises something that I've long wondered about with Eastern philosophy. So, well, I have you, I'll ask. I, so I've not read a ton of Eastern philosophy. And part of that is because I find it very difficult to read and very difficult to get a, like a mental grasp of in a way that I find relatively straightforward with Western philosophy. And it's often, it's that style that it feels like. And so tell me if I'm, if this is like an accurate characterization for one, that the writing does seem to be more aphorisms and metaphor and poetic as opposed to like the treatises that you get from, say, the ancient Greeks, where it's, I'm going to make an argument and here's the steps and I'm going to give support and I'm going to deal with objections and it looks like a traditional argumentative form and Eastern philosophy. I've read a decent amount of like Buddhist writings and it's, it's a similar thing. It's like, it's much more slippery and it's harder to see exactly what the arguments are versus the kind of poetic images. Is that, is that accurate at all? I think that perception is an artifact of the fact that, that Westerners who are interested in Eastern philosophy are usually looking for something different from Western philosophy. And so the texts that are best known in the West tend to be the more poetic, aphoristic ones, but you could find in both Chinese and Indian philosophy, you can find, you know, treatises that are full of, of arguments and, you know, and, you know, logic chopping and so forth. The kind of stuff that Western philosophers love is just that those have not been the texts that have been the most popular in the West precisely because people were looking for something else. But, you know, I think, for example, in, in, in China, there's a philosopher named Mozart, who, who's kind of a utilitarian, semi utilitarian, semi-contractarian thinker, and his, his works are just, you know, straight argument up and down. But that's one reason that, you know, he hasn't been that popular in the West. Well, or in China either, really, because he sort of became eclipsed by the Confucians and the Dalas. So Westerners are looking for sort of cliches of Chinese thought and they, and they find them, if that's all they're looking for. Yeah, they want the things that look like a fortune cookie. Or like the guy who gives the Mogwai to, to the guy in Gremlins. Like that, that's, that's kind of a philosopher's, right? You actually write that, this kind of surprised me that the spontaneous order, the sort of Hayekian or at least Scottish Enlightenment kind of idea seems to have originated or arguably was first articulated in the Confucian tradition. How does, how does that work? Well, there's this, there's this line of Confucianism that for the way for the, the way for the emperor to rule is simply for him to, you know, to hold still and let everything happen around him. Which the Dalas say too. And that is a spontaneous sort of idea from the Dalas. But the Confucians seem to have said it first. And the idea is that if, you know, if things are properly set up, you don't need to be tinkering with the micromanaging them. Now the, the Confucians think that a lot of, a lot of what happens can be done through moral inspiration. If you're a morally inspiring leader, you don't actually have to go around giving orders. You just, they're in, you know, moral inspiration emanates from you and that inspires people to go do stuff on their own. But also a lot of the Confucians, you know, some of the Confucians talk about spontaneous order being created by market incentives. They were fasted in particular, Mungsa and Sumacian, those two, were fascinated by, by market relations and by the way in which without any such a planning, goods from all over the, you know, the world, end up, you know, traveling, the people are able to enjoy stuff that came from the distant north and south and east and west. Simply as a result of market incentives. So that's not a moral inspiration case. The moral inspiration case is sort of the more famous thing that people know about Confucianism. But you also find this thing, I was just thinking that, that market relations are really cool for this ability to produce order without anyone planning it. So were they free market people, like as we would understand that today? I think Sumacian comes pretty close. Mungsa has a mixture of, you know, sort of free market and non free market ideas. But, but, you know, Sumacian, in Sumacian, you find this kind of, this praise of entrepreneurs, it sounds almost, you know, a mix of Kersner and Rand and his enthusiasm for, you know, the ability of entrepreneurs to, to identify proper profit opportunities and so forth. And you also find in Sumacian a lot of criticism of government regulations. There's also a text called the Discourses of Salt and Iron, which is a record of a debate during the early Han dynasty between the Confucians and the legalists about government policy. And the legalists were sort of, you know, constructivist bureaucratic top down micromanagers who wanted to, you know, unify everything under common standards and so forth and regulate everything. And the Confucians are saying, this is, you know, all these regulations have, you know, have piling up the taxes and the regulations have impoverished the people and they're supposed to be causing order, they're just causing chaos, they just, you know, ease up, leave them alone and, you know, let people, you know, let people do what they, what they want to do and that will produce wealth and prosperity and peace. So, you know, there's strong libertarian themes there, even if, you know, they probably wouldn't, you know, they might not, you know, they might not check off every box and on the, you know, on the libertarian quiz precisely as we might want. But they were, you know, definitely headed in that direction. Now, where are they coming from in terms of, like, ethically, if we're, if we were to put them into a Western philosophical school for why they're supporting these free markets or at least observing that they work? I mean, they could be just completely observational and saying, hey, these markets work, but it sounds like they're supporting them. Are they basically consequentialists or is it sort of a harmony kind of thing? And I don't mean to completely bottle up Chinese philosophy with the word harmony as a Westerners want to do. Or are they, is there like a rights theory undergirding this in some way? Well, they were, they were critical of, certainly there are consequentialist aspects to their thought, but they're critical of the, of the consequentialism of the Moists and the Yangists. So to oversimplify a little bit, the Moists were sort of universalist utilitarians who said, you should do whatever is best for, for everyone, universal benefit. And the Yangists were egoists and said, you should do what is best for your own personal benefit. And the, the Confucians didn't like either of these accounts. They thought they were too, you know, too unjustified means, kind of approaches. They, you know, the closest, you know, parallel of lots of differences with the closest parallel would be sort of the virtue theory you find with Plato and Aristotle. This idea of a, the, the, the right way to act is a way that expresses the virtues, expresses what it means to be a properly functioning human being with the right source of attitudes. The Confucians also place a very strong emphasis on tradition. And this is one reason that they're often thought of as being closer to conservatism than to libertarianism. Of course, it depends on the details and the mood and so forth. Certainly, they were very strongly traditionalist. They thought that tradition embodied a kind of historical wisdom. They were suspicious of innovation. Now you can, you can take that in a Hayekian direction where it looks more compatible with libertarianism or you can take it in a more, in a more conservative direction and you could find those impulses pushing both ways in Confucianism. But they, they thought of tradition as sort of the, you know, the oil of civilization, that tradition is what enables us to, you know, to interact without compulsion. The fact that we share these common traditions and give a kind of a grace to our, our interactions. One of the maybe stereotypes of Confucianism, though, is this, they're steeped in tradition, but also have a really strong sense of social hierarchy that would seem to cut against a libertarian interpretation. Yes, they, you know, they certainly were more into social hierarchy than, you know, than, than we would like. They wanted the social hierarchy not to be, you know, not to be maintained by coercion. But nevertheless, they certainly were into it. They had their version of the, of the golden rule says, you know, basically treat, you know, treat your ruler the way you would want your subordinate to treat you, treat your subordinate the way you'd want your ruler to treat you, treat your, your parents the way you'd want your children to treat you. So it's like that is so the, the, you know, they have these relations of reciprocity, but they build in, you know, this hierarchy into it. And that's, that's a less libertarian aspect of them. On the other hand, they, they also think that if people, when people act unvirtuously in fulfilling their social roles, they lose, you know, they lose the title to that respect of the role. So for example, in Munxa, there's a little exchange where the, the Prince is talking with Munxa about some Prince in the rival state who was, you know, who's overthrown and killed by the people. And the Prince says, well, surely you don't think it's okay to, you know, to kill the Prince to you. And Munxa says, well, a Prince is someone who rules properly. I heard that they executed some common criminal, but I don't consider that they executed a Prince. In other words, if you don't act the way a Prince is supposed to act, you no longer have title to be considered a Prince. I mean, that seems pretty hardcore. Yeah, that's completely hardcore. Do they have some sort of view of the illegitimacy of power? Because I'm trying to also imagine the, the empires that they lived in, you said the Han dynasty, for example, the rulers of these dynasties, they were, they weren't with a divine right of kings kind of situation. Did they have a skepticism toward government power that also let them believe in markets more if, for example, did they have views on taxation that it could be wrong or legitimate in some way that just because they thought the state wasn't fully powerful, imbued with godlike powers? Well, Confucius sent it to favor low taxation. They, you know, they never, they never say that they're against it entirely. They had this, this idea of a, you know, roughly 10% taxation should be the maximum. So there's like Herman Cain, like the 999 program. We didn't actually know where Herman Cain was getting that. And now we figured it out. We really sold him short. Yeah. I thought it was Pokemon that he got it. Okay, that too. Yes. Yeah, that was just, you know, just slightly, slightly to the, to the east of China. But the, I mean, so the context here is, you know, so we have, first, we have the, you know, the collapse of the Zhou dynasties, you've got all these these new little states popping up. It's called the warring states period. You have a brief period where China is united under the Qin dynasty. Really brief. It was like 15 years. And this was a period when the, the legalists that I mentioned before, the top down micromanagers became the dominant ideology. That's the, the Qin dynasty is the one that be that, well, they obviously built the Great Wall of China. Now, what we have now is, you know, what we have now is, is a later, you know, a later addition to that wall. But I mean, they built the original first Great Wall of China. And also, you know, the famous, the famous imperial tomb with all the terracotta warriors, you know, that's from the Qin dynasty. The Qin dynasty was overthrown. And the sort of nice story about how it was overthrown, which was the legalists had this view that light offenses should be published, should be punished just as heavily as, as major ones, because the idea is, well, you want to prevent all offenses, not just the major ones. And so all offenses, major or minor should be treated really severely. So there was this group of soldiers that was, that was supposedly making their way from point A to point B, and they had to go through the swampy area. And they realized they're going to be late for, you know, the point they're supposed to show up at the penalty for being late was death. And so they said, Well, what's the penalty for trying to overthrow the government? Death. Well, we're definitely going to be late. So, you know, they had no incentive not to know. So this is like, well, we were going to do that, we might as well overthrow the government. This is like the way that the libertarians have raised about three strikes, your outlaws, which is, you know, if you're, you know, if I'm going to rob you, and you know, it's my third strike, and I might as well kill you to get rid of the witness since there's no, you know, since there's no worse penalty for that than for robbing. Anyway, so, and that's the chin dynasty gets overthrown and they bring in a new dynasty, the Han dynasty. So we do get a unified China. And of course, when I say unified China, the area is unified as much smaller than what is China today. But what they would have considered unified. So the, so the early Confucians are writing, you know, during the warring states period, now before the, before the unification, then so much in the historian, he's writing afterward in the, these, these discourses of salt and iron about the salt and iron monopolies is written during the early Han. So the early Han is, you know, the Confucians all agree that it's an improvement on the chin. The chin was a particularly oppressive regime. The, according to the Confucians, the, the chin dynasty burned lots of books and buried scholars alive. Historians are, you know, debate as to how much of that is, is true. And how much of that is just, you know, the next dynasty, you know, telling nasty stories about the previous one. But still it does look as though, you know, if you look at who the political advisors were, and you read what the kind of things the political advisors advocate, you think, well, it probably was pretty bad, whether or not it was as bad as, as they say. So, so, you know, so the early Confucians are writing during a period when China's not getting unified. And the later, later ones are writing, you know, after it has been, of course, they all wanted it to be unified. Now, the Chinese, most of the Chinese philosophers, it's kind of like Renaissance Italy, where all the theorists are talking about it will be wonderful when, you know, we finally get unified. Part of the reason they wanted this unification and centralization is that they thought it would end the warfare among the states. But the Confucians didn't want unification to be done by military conquests, which is what the legalists were doing. They wanted it to be done by, by, you know, ineffective competition by having the successful rulers be imitated and having the successful rulers have everyone else come and want to join them and want to, you know, want to be ruled by them rather than whoever they're else they were being ruled by. So they had this vision of China becoming unified through a kind of competition in, in good, in good ruling. So they thought that there should be competition between rulers and that you should just move to the one who's doing a better job. And then if he starts doing a worse job up and leave to somewhere else that rulers were fairly constrained because if they weren't ruling properly then they weren't rulers in the first place. They were fans of trade, fans of markets, opposed to coercion. They sound an awful lot like market anarchists. Yeah, the problem though is that they, they wanted the competition to end with, you know, the best one winning. You know, in other words, they thought they didn't think of the competition as an ongoing way of maintaining order. Although sometimes they begin like to look like they're moving in that direction. But most of the time they think that, you know, the competition is a way for the best rulers to end up in charge and so you'll eventually have all China reunified under the best rulers. So they thought of competition as having an endpoint where you, you know, the best one wins and then you're done. That seems almost nozicky and like overlapping security agencies. One single big one emerges due to the efficiencies in the process. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, and I think that they were, they were assuming that. I mean, they were, I remember that the conditions are coming, you know, they or their predecessors had been, you know, minor functionaries in the Joe dynasty and they had it pretty good and then came all the social chaos and the fragmentation into all these fighting states. And so a lot of them, I think just assumed that the, you know, the best result was unification again. I don't think that they really thought of, you know, they were something that's an alternative to, you know, to both of those things. On the other hand, Sima Chen is a big fan of these, there were these private vigilantes who were sort of half bandits and half freelance cops. Batman, Batman. You should have said Batman. Just for air. We always put Batman as much as we can. They were Batman. Anyway, he had, you know, he's a big fan of them and they, you know, they would offer their, you know, their protective services to various people and he has perhaps a more romanticized, you know, image of them may be accurate. Maybe Robin Hood is a sort of the closest thing. Robin Hood and the Batman costume. But anyway, that's a, you know, his enthusiasm for them is sort of, you know, in entrepreneurs in rights protection is a, you see, that's an anarchist strand in his thought, even if he doesn't. Do we have any idea, do we have any idea how many people in the living in normal people living in China at the time? Because the Confucians, the ones we're talking about, they were occupying governmental roles mostly or were they, were they professional intellectuals? What were they actually doing? Well, they were, initially they were, you know, they were going, you know, from state to state trying to become officials. Once the haunt dynasty gets started, then you end up with a sort of bureaucratic class of Confucians, although the legalists were still around, too, as a bureaucratic class and there was competition within them. So, yeah, they're either, they're either state officials or they're trying to become state officials for the most part. Are they, are they teaching it? I mean, they're universities because I've tried, I want to know how many people, normal people, like the guy selling fruit in the street, was a, was a Confucian. Would any of those people have been like, oh, I'm a Confucian, another persona, like no, I'm a legalist. Was that, was that where the debate was also happening? The, I mean, the vast majority of the population were peasants. It's not clear whether they were even literate in most cases. So, I would guess that the average person had no idea why there was this stuff going on. But, you know, it's hard to say. The, you know, the people who, you know, whose writings we have don't talk that much about what the average person was doing. No, certainly we, we find stories about, you know, someone arising among the peasantry who's some kind of a wise man or inspirational figure or something. And then various stories and doctrines will get attached to him. But it's, it's hard to know how much that's history and how much isn't. I wanted to ask about, you mentioned this thing called the, the well-field system that was pretty interesting. Yeah, so this is an idea that Mungta has. The, it's a system where you have a, you have a grid of, like a nine, a grid of nine squares, like a tic-tac-toe. That's why it's called the well-field system, because the, it has nothing to do with an actual well. It's just that the, the Chinese character, the symbol for well, looks kind of like a tic-tac-toe. And so the, the, you see, you have eight private farms centered around a, the central common square. So the idea is that the, the people all work on their individual, each family has its own individual farm. Then the, the families together all cultivate the common farm and then the, the taxes are paid to the state from the common farm, not from the private ones. So immediately it looks like there's a serious free rider problem here, because, you know, if, you know, if the taxes are paid from the common farm, it seems like you have incentive to spend most of your time cultivating your private farm and not cultivating the common ones. A lot of people thought, well, you know, Mungta seems to have a, you know, bad economic ideas here. But, you know, Mungta says his reason for the system is to limit taxation. It's to make it, at least that's one reason for it. It's to make it harder for the state to tax people by saying that they can only tax the common farm. So I think that the, you know, the free rider aspect is sort of part of what he wants. That is to say, you're not going to spend a lot of time cultivating the common farm unless you really feel pretty, you know, pretty patriotic and pretty, you know, you're pretty inspired by, by the existing regime and you actually want to give it some kind of support. So it's a way of making taxation, as I see it, it's a way of making taxation contingent on the, the, the rulers doing a good job of inspiring the people and getting their support. And so, you know, it's actually a way of, of, of giving the people a kind of veto power on what the state is doing, and if the less, the less inspired they are by what the state is doing, the less inspired they are to spend much of the time working on the, on the common plot, and so the less taxes the state gets. That's, you know, that, no, amongst us doesn't see that explicitly, but that's sort of my, you know, the impression I'm getting from what it's, what it's about. Let's say all this and, and have a read all this, the thing that struck me today is that this seems like a fairly individualist philosophy, and a lot of times, and maybe this is just Western ignorance or my own ignorance, but when we think about China today and a lot of the East, we don't really think about individualist philosophies carrying much weight, they're far more communitarian and their discussion of society and the, and the value of community. Did Confucianism change? I mean, first of all, is it accurate to call it a pretty individualist philosophy, and then has it changed to a more communitarian as it, as it evolved into modern times? Well, it depends what exactly you mean by those words, because there's a sense in which the Confucians are always very, you know, very communitarian, they're very social, they think that you're, um, that, you know, your proper role as a human being has to do with your, you know, with your participating in these very social, uh, relations. You know, of course that's not necessarily inconsistent with, with individualism, and Hayek certainly wouldn't think so, for example, and often, you know, often it's, uh, you know, it's Hayek that one is reminded of in reading some of, of this stuff, because there's, if you want an example of someone who combines strong individualism with a kind of communitarian traditionalism, um, you know, because it's Hayek an individualist or is he a communitarian? Well, there are aspects of, of both. Um, but it's interesting when it's like limiting taxation, for example, uh, these kind of things where, where it would seem that the reason you would do that is because you care about the individual one of the reasons, uh, not wanting to take too much from them. Whereas if you were saying the community, you could, you wouldn't have a view of limiting taxation, just say, no, as much as the community needs kind of thing. Well, I think that thinking of the, the rulers are, you can think of it this way, the rulers are taking money from the community, um, and you know, there's, the rulers are supposed to have the interest of the community at heart, but at the, you know, they're taxing all these people, you know, I mean all the people together are the community and the, you know, the rulers are, you know, are individuals extracting money from the community. So, uh, so, so maybe I completely mischaracterize it, but, but the part of the question I said is Confucianism today, uh, is it different, um, in a, in a meaningful because it is still pretty popular religion, if I remember correctly. Yeah. And I think, you know, certainly Confucianism has, you know, has made its peace with the, you know, with state power a lot more than, uh, than it had in those days. And I think, you know, you can sort of see the process, um, because initially the, you know, the Confucians are trying to get political influence, but eventually they get it. Eventually they become a privileged bureaucratic class within the state and becoming a privileged bureaucratic class within the state does tend to, you know, alter your incentives. So, uh, you know, I think the Confucians are at their best during the period when they still have to compete for influence, uh, with, with rival schools, once they become sort of the established monopoly, uh, within the state, you know, I think then, although there's, there are interesting continuities with the earlier tradition, they, they become, for one thing they become much less fans of trade because they, you know, the early Confucians, especially people like Mungta and Sema Chen were really fans of, of trade and commerce and they're really impressed by the fact that, that economic incentives were bringing these goods from all over the world, uh, when later on the Confucians become very suspicious of, of trade and travel and interaction with foreign cultures and, uh, you know, in effect, uh, they, you know, they end up sort of clamping down on, on, uh, China's economic relations with, with other countries because, because there's that period when the, you know, the Chinese are sending these giant ships all over the world and the Confucians were against all that, they're against these trade, yeah, things, the later Confucians were. So, I think that the Confucians lose a lot of their libertarian edge when they become a, you know, a professional class or privileged class within the state. So, given how strong this libertarian edge appears to be for at least the early Confucians, why is it that they then seem to get as little play as they do from modern libertarians and when we're discussing the history of liberty? I mean, going back to the beginning, like the, the Taoists get mentioned fairly frequently as earlier proto-libertarians and the Confucians don't, but if they were this strongly libertarian, why don't we see more of them? Well, again, I think, I'm not sure, I mean, most, most Westerners who've read any Chinese philosophy, you know, have probably read, you know, Lao Tzu and, and some Confucius maybe. So, they, you know, not that many Westerners have, you know, have read these other thinkers. You know, I guess Mencius, fair number of people have read, have read him, but a lot of cases they just not, there's not that, that well-known. And Sumo Chin is not as, it was widely read as he ought to be. His history is just a fascinating. So, why, why should our listeners read them, other than what you've said? I mean, you mentioned a bunch of it today, but what, what, what additional thing do they bring to the libertarian tradition? Well, it's just, it's a, it's a contribution that isn't, you know, that isn't, this isn't quite the same as, you know, as either the, you know, the rights-based locking approach or the utilitarian approach or the Randy and Igorist approach. It's just, you know, it's another approach that has some things in common with those other things, but it's different. I think one thing that's interesting is that, you know, people, a lot of people tend to think that libertarianism is a distinctively western value and that it's, it's not appropriate for Asian cultures and so on. By pointing out some of the, the aspects of this tradition, you can show that it isn't just a, you know, isn't just a western thing. Now, I start off with this tendentious quote from Ludwigs and Mises at the beginning of the book. I says, the idea of liberty is, has always been peculiar to the West, but separates East and West is, first of all, the fact that the peoples of the East never conceived the idea of liberty. The East lacked the primordial thing, the idea of freedom from the state. And I quoted that because, you know, that's something that a lot of people believe, not just Mises. And I think that it's brought us to simply not reading enough of the things people ought to be reading. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today's show, please take a moment to rate us on iTunes. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.